I am sympathetic to this kind of argument in certain contexts. In the essay you were commenting on, I specifically make that argument against infanticide, even if it turns out that infants do not have right-to-life consciousness. (I also provide some paraphrases of scientific evidence that shows that this view of infants is false.) But an argument like this requires looking at the actual concrete results produced by the law in question. It is not enough to imagine what the world would be like if there were no abortions. We have to consider what the world would be actually be like if abortion were illegal. It may be true that a world in which no one drank alcohol would be a better place. But prohibition was repealed because outlawing alcohol did not produce such a world, and the world it produced was far worse than the one with legal alcohol.

We don’t have to speculate about the impact of criminalizing abortion. I lived in such a world until I was 23, and have lived in a world with legal abortions since then. The former was a world in which a woman’s career could be permanently destroyed by an early unwanted pregnancy (as was the man’s career if he “stepped up and did the right thing”). A world in which a woman could be denied employment because of the possibility that she would have to quit when she became pregnant. It was a world in which people of both sexes could be forced to spend their lives in loveless marriages, to raise children they didn’t want. These children had a high chance of becoming neurotics and/or criminals because they could sense that no one wanted them. It was a world in which a woman who had children she wanted could be forced to have more children she didn’t want, who could drive the family into poverty.

It was also a world that had a kind of “coarseness” in its view of women. When you say that the rights of a possible child must always overrule the rights of an actual woman, you are reducing all women to the status of baby machines, without the full autonomy of a free agents. This debasement of women was why people accepted laws that forbid a married woman in 1950s America to get a credit card without her husband’s consent (it didn’t work the other way around) and forbid her to do business using her non-married name.

I could go on like this for paragraphs and paragraphs, and there are plenty of other articles on Medium and elsewhere that do so. The forced-birth advocates have always known about the suffering caused by forcing people to have abortions, which is why they almost always base their arguments on issues of Justice, rather than happiness or character. Those Justice-based arguments only work if you say that the fetus really is a baby in some sense or another. The “useful” fiction you propose to preserve our fine moral sentiments does far more to corrupt our moral sentiments.